I have always turned towards other horizons, always tried to know what is happening elsewhere. — Emil Cioran

“A 58-year-old homeless resident of Leszno who stole 8,000 marks from an acquaintance and then gave part of the money to other homeless people is to stand trial. The regional prosecutor’s office has referred the indictment to court. The homeless ‘Robin Hood’ gave 2,000 marks to his fellow residents at a homeless shelter in Leszno; with the remaining money he set out on a journey around Poland. For a fortnight he travelled. At railway stations in Poznań, Wrocław, and Kalisz he bought food for homeless people and gave away the stolen money. He turned himself in to the police after he learned from the press that the acquaintance he had robbed had died of a heart attack.” (Gazeta Wyborcza, 6 April 2000.)

Why, this is a ready-made film script! But is not everything a ready-made film script?

Sunday, 4 March 2001

Mexico. We go to breakfast in a beautiful neighbourhood — San Angel. A restaurant in the colonial style: walls of red tufa, arches of light sandstone, and from the same stone high, ornate portals. The establishment is called Fondo de Santa Clara and is the morning meeting place of those who have a great deal of money. Along the way one passes the enormous, sumptuous, overflowing flower markets, already open (and open around the clock). Full of roses, carnations, azaleas, and petunias; mountains of greenery, bouquets, and arrangements. The restaurant itself also drowns in flowers and — fortunately — in shade, for although it is morning, it is already hot, already the sun is scorching.

Night train from Moscow to Riga. In a two-berth sleeping compartment sat opposite me an older man, short, broad-shouldered. After a quarter of an hour of conversation he reached into a brown oilskin bag and drew out a jar of pickled cucumbers, a loaf of wholemeal bread, and a bottle of vodka. He sliced the bread, divided the cucumbers, and poured each of us half a glass.

“Nu!” he said invitingly and raised his glass. We drank. His face now expressed relief and satisfaction. He introduced himself: “Sergei Ivanovich Selyaev, retired colonel, Hero of the Soviet Union.”

I told him my name. He began to ask me about Poland, about Warsaw. At a certain point I mentioned that I had been born in Pinsk, in Polesie.

“Ah, Polesie!” Selyaev brightened. “Yes, it was there, on the Pripyat. We were advancing westward. I was a simple private. Our battalion was to cross the Pripyat, but on the far bank the Germans had dug in deep, had strong fortifications, we felt they would defend to the last. It was early spring, the river had flooded wide, it looked like a sea…”

He told the story of how his battalion crossed the river, how he fell into a pit and got his foot caught in the roots of a tree, how he lay there all day while the battle raged around him, how his enforced immobility was later interpreted by the staff as heroism — holding a bridgehead single-handed. And so he became a Hero of the Soviet Union. With all the privileges that entitled: officer’s rank, a free flat in Moscow, access to well-stocked shops, free travel on all trains and buses, and every year a free stay at a sanatorium of his choice. He was going now to the spa at Jūrmala, near Riga, to treat the rheumatism that he was certain he had contracted in that pit above the Pripyat, where fifty years ago he had fallen so unluckily — yet also so very fortunately.

Tingatinga. I must have encountered him in Dar es Salaam at the beginning of the 1960s, when I lived there. In the catalogue of the exhibition of his paintings — which I am just visiting in the Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw — it says that Tingatinga, born in 1932 in southern Tanzania, was in the 1960s a street vendor of vegetables in Dar es Salaam, and that in 1972 he was killed by a police patrol chasing a thief: shooting at the fleeing criminal, the police accidentally killed Tingatinga. I can easily imagine this situation, because I witnessed several similar scenes on the main street of Dar es Salaam — then called Independence Avenue, today Eduardo Mondlane.

Tingatinga was a great painterly talent — an African Douanier Rousseau, a Pirosmani, an Ociepka. He painted the colourful, lush, vibrant world of Africa. His paintings are full of stylised animals — elephants, lions, crocodiles — full of birds, masses of trees. There are witchdoctors too, with their countless treasures: snake skins, dried lizards, ground herbs, mysterious pebbles.

source: kapuscinski.info